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The Rochester Police Department in New York on Sunday released body camera footage showing officers handcuffing and pepper spraying a 9-year-old girl while responding to a call for “family issues.”
The two disturbing videos show the distressed child screaming for her father as officers attempted to restrain and seat her in a police vehicle on Friday afternoon.
“You act like a child,” an officer told him in the video.
“I am a child,” she shouts.
“I’m going to spray you pepper, and I don’t want to,” a policewoman said to the girl, trying to get her to step into the police car.
“This is your last chance. Otherwise, pepper spray is going into your eyeballs,” the officer said.
The girl, whose face was blurred in the videos, begs the police not to spray her. After being sprayed with cayenne pepper, she screams, “It went in my eyes, it went in my eyes.”
Officials did not identify the child, his family or any of the agents involved in the incident.
“I’m not going to stay here and tell you that for a 9-year-old it’s normal to get pepper sprayed,” Rochester Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan said at a conference. Sunday press. “It’s not. I don’t see that is what we are as a department.”
The incident brought further scrutiny at a police department whose senior officials resigned last September following protests against the death of Daniel Prude, a black man who died of asphyxiation after officers in Rochester put a balaclava over his head and nailed him to the ground.
Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said Friday’s incident was “something neither of us should want to justify.”
She said the young girl reminded her of her own daughter.
“I have a 10-year-old daughter. So she’s a child. She’s a baby,” Warren said. “And I can tell you that this video, as a mother, is not something you want to see.”
“I saw my baby’s face on his face,” she said in an emotional appeal for compassion and empathy in the way the police operate in the community.
Warren said she asked the police chief to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into the incident, adding that she welcomed a review by the police accountability committee.
Officers who responded to a “family problems” report at around 3:21 pm local time on Friday were told the 9-year-old was “upset” and “suicidal” and had indicated that she “wanted to kill herself and that she wanted to kill her mother, ”Rochester Deputy Police Chief Andre Anderson said on Sunday.
Body camera video shows a police officer following the girl, who was wearing a hoodie with colorful leggings and a backpack, as she attempted to escape.
As the officer tries to calm the girl down, she argues with her mother over a family dispute. The officer then asks the mother to leave.
Anderson said the officer decided to “take the child out of the situation and put her in a car where we can get her help.”
But the young girl refused, he said, and “struggled” at one point, kicking an officer in the chest and knocking over a camera worn on her body.
The video shows police officers struggling to restrain the child as she repeatedly shouts, “I want my father.”
The police then handcuffed the child while she was on the snow-covered ground and attempted to make her sit inside the police vehicle.
“I just want to see my dad, please,” the child pleaded, asking for a “girl officer”.
In the second body camera video, the female officer is seen trying to calm the child down and get him to put his legs inside the car, promising him that she will try to find her. his father.
After unsuccessful attempts, the officer warns the sobbing girl that she will spray her with pepper if she doesn’t comply.
An officer said, “Just spray her. Just spray her at this point.”
The female officer is seen shaking a box; a can is also seen in the hand of the other officer. It is not known who sprayed the child with pepper.
“It didn’t seem like she was resisting the officers. She was trying not to have to go to the hospital, ”Anderson said. “While the police made numerous attempts to try and get her into the car, an officer sprayed the young child with OC spray to get her into the car.
She was then transported to Rochester General Hospital and then released.
Anderson said he was not trying to “make excuses for what happened” and that the changes will happen by “actually talking to the officers involved and asking them to look into de-escalation.”
“Our overall goal is to change culture,” he said.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Other international suicide helplines are available at befrienders.org. You can also text TALK at 741741 for free, anonymous 24/7 crisis assistance in the United States from the Crisis Text Line.
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